The ‘Mr. Robot’ Cell Phone Game Will Get Inside Your Head

As the series carries its grim story into the real world, will anyone but the obsessives stay on board?

If you had to pick a modern TV show to live in, you'd probably get pretty far down the list before you'd settle on Mr. Robot: an ultra-dangerous, ultra-grim world in which the economy is tanking in the aftermath of a brutal computer hack that was perpetrated by the good guys. But if you want a brief glimpse of what it’s like to have Mr. Robot in your head, there's a new, immersive app designed to plunge you into it—and I've spent the past few days plumbing its secrets.

The app—technically called Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n, in the irritating house style of Mr. Robot's episode titles—is an effort to make the player an active participant in world of Mr. Robot. The game, which is set between the fifth and sixth episodes of the show's first season, eschews the hardline programming required of an actual hacker in favor of soft, vulnerable human targets: primarily low-level employees with access to various parts of E Corp, who can be tricked or coerced into giving up valuable information or completing tasks over a long string of text messages.

The game wastes no time establishing the stakes of its premise. You, the player, have either found or stolen a cell phone, and its owner—a member of fsociety, whose identity is revealed deeper into the narrative—is in the middle of a very time-sensitive mission. There's no time to waste, so the hacker anoints you an honorary (and arguably unwilling) member of the collective, and assigns you a series of tasks. At first, it's fairly straightforward. You dig around for a missing image file, or sweet-talk a naive E Corp insider into handing over her password. But soon, you'll be confronted with some morally dubious situations: goading an unwitting E Corp employee into a scheme that will undoubtedly lead to him losing his job, or blackmailing a computer technician by threatening to reveal something terrible to his 12-year-old-son.

The simulation is gripping, if a little imperfect for those who are familiar with the show’s central characters. Darlene is a little too friendly; Elliot is a little too verbose (though it's possible that his urgent missives are coming from the Mr. Robot side of his brain). And the game is savvy enough in the fluidity of an actual messaging platform to increase immersion by sending you messages that have absolutely nothing to do with fsociety; over the course of the game, you'll end up in a long, annoying group text about an upcoming vacation and get regular updates from apps that are clearly modeled on Tinder and Seamless.

But for all the cleverness, it won't take long before the limitations of Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n become apparent. The app's best gimmick is how the hackers use your actual name when they threaten you—which will probably inspire a minor blood pressure spike before you remember that the game literally began by asking you to enter your name. But after a brief, thrilling moment when I got a phone call from an unlisted number in the middle of a high-stakes mission—a call that turned out to be totally unrelated to Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n—it became clear that texting is the only trick up the app's sleeve. If the game really wanted to make you as paranoid as Elliot Alderson, there are plenty of missed opportunities based on the technology you can find on the average smartphone: sending you recorded voice calls, or asking you to take a selfie, or even creeping on your location via GPS.

The game is savvy enough to increase immersion by sending you messages that have nothing to do with fsociety; you'll end up in a long, annoying group text about an upcoming vacation.

The creators of Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n have said they designed the game to take about a week, but beginning to end, mine lasted a little over four days. It's possible that my experience was shorter because I didn’t explore every conversation path; whenever someone texted me to call me out on my bullshit, I simply ignored them, so the consequences for all the lies I told never materialized. But whatever the reason, my game ultimately ended with a whimper; after I completed my final mission, I got a parting middle finger from my fsociety contact, and the app reset itself, with all my painstakingly composed conversations erased. (To be fair, that’s almost definitely how an fsociety hacker would actually erase these kinds of tracks.)

Did Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n enhance my enjoyment of Mr. Robot in general? There are no particularly illuminating revelations about the show’s overarching plot—but it did provide an approximation of the stresses of life within fsociety, where you're racing ahead to the next goal while trying to avoid the consequences of the lies you've told and the lives you've ruined. It's also just one of many ways that Mr. Robot continues to rely on extra-textual sources to expand its universe. As Lili Loofbourow wrote a couple of weeks ago, we've reached the point at which simply watching Mr. Robot is hardly the complete Mr. Robot experience. The show's official website is teeming with Easter eggs, from in-universe newspaper articles and videos to a full-blown hacking mini-game that invites careful viewers to experiment with actual commands used within the show. In November, Elliot’s "Red Wheelbarrow" notebook will be published as an real book. Who knows what secrets it might contain?

But perhaps more than anything created by Sam Esmail and the rest of the Mr. Robot team, there's the unofficial, fan-driven extension of the Mr. Robot universe: Reddit, where fans from around the world meet online to swap conspiracy theories in a manner that’s not entirely dissimilar to the way Elliot Alderson communicates with the outside world.

As its scope continues to expand, Mr. Robot is openly courting viewers who are inclined to treat the series like a puzzle box. The downside, of course, is that there’s a real chance Mr. Robot will never be able to outmaneuver the crowdsourced hive mind of its most dedicated fans. This season's big twist, which was only formally revealed in last week's episode, had been deciphered and disseminated across the internet within hours of the Season Two premiere. ("I didn't expect people to catch on from the very first episode," Esmail conceded in an interview with Alan Sepinwall.)

If you think that sounds like a crazy amount of effort just to enjoy a TV show, you're right! But Mr. Robot, with its anemic ratings and frame-by-frame Reddit breakdowns, is a show for the obsessives. If you're going to get into it at all, you might as well get into it all the way. And if the ever-increasing onslaught of cryptic secrets and rabbit holes are leading to an anticlimax—well, Lost fans will have plenty of condolences to offer.

And that brings us back to Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n. For now, less than a week after its release, the app sits dormant on my app screen, having reset itself after I successfully completed my mission on behalf of fsociety. But from a gaming perspective, the best thing about the modern era is how everything is just a quick downloadable update away from becoming something fresh again. If someday, weeks or months from now, my phone buzzes with a new text from Mr. Robot, I'll be ready to dive right back in.

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Ralphie

Ralphie has no memory of a phlegmatic moment from childhood but grew up to be described as composed, 'calm, cool, and collected', controlled, serene, tranquil, placid, impassive, imperturbable, unruffled... loves reading, writing, traveling, making friends and sharing thoughts. When he's not working on projects and executing startups, he is researching and writing.